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Nonprofits, Open Source and Leadership: ONE/Northwest and the Plone Community

My colleagues and I at ONE/Northwest have been spending a lot of time engaging with an Open Source software development community (the folks who make Plone) over the past two years. It’s been an amazing learning experience.

The following essay summarizes our experiences and attempts to tease out someulearnings both for nonprofits and for Open Source communities

This is a really rough first draft. I invite your thoughts, feedback, questions and criticisms. Tell me what parts (if any) ring true with you. Tell me what to cut. Tell me what I missed, or what I just plain got wrong.

How I was able to contribute to the community and build social capital in it.

What nonprofit people are good at; what open-source software developers are good at; what we can learn from each other, and how those things are complimentary.

Over the past two years, I’ve spent a bunch of time a bit outside of my “home base” in the Pacific Northwest environmental NGO community. I’ve been hanging out (both in person and online) with a community of open-source software developers — the Plone community. (Plone is a popular Open Source content management system; it’s software that nonprofits — and lots of other folks — use for building powerful, interactive websites.)

Jumping headlong into a thriving community of brilliant Open Source programmers has been a fascinating adventure. I’ve learned a lot about Open Source, about working with programmers, and about the nonprofit community as well.

Of course, what you see depends on where you stand, so I should probably start with my background. I’ve spent the past 11 years at ONE/Northwest (www.onenw.org), helping nonprofit environmental advocacy organizations figure out how to harness the internet for social change. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about technology (my mom thinks I’m a computer whiz) but I’m not a programmer. My degree is in political science and most of my skills are in project management and communications strategy. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably doing political organizing.

ONE/Northwest’s Experiences in the Plone Community

The web is a powerful communications platform for nonprofits. Its global reach and low barriers to access make it an key part of any organization’s online communications toolbox. But building powerful, professional, easy-to-use websites is still quite challenging, technically and otherwise. The rapidly increasing power of web systems over the past decade has only increased the challenges facing small organizations with limited in-house technical skills.

In mid 2004, it occurred to us at ONE/Northwest that an emerging class of Open Source content management systems, which large enterprises had been using for several years, might well be good enough and easy enough to use for smaller nonprofits. After evaluating a number of content management systems, including Plone, Drupal and Joomla, we chose Plone as the ideal platform upon which to base a pilot program for building a new generation of low-cost, feature-rich, easy-to-use nonprofit websites.

All modesty aside, we turned out to be spectacularly right. We quickly found that Plone let us easily build impressive websites for the nonprofit environmental groups we serve. We could customize Plone to meet the widely varying needs of this diverse community. We could continually re-use bits and pieces of software we developed, and even better, Plone’s ease of use meant that environmental activists with very limited technology skills could maintain and update their websites without any outside help.

But something else happened.

Plone isn’t just a software product. It’s a community. A global community of smart, passionate, dedicated people who have come together around a shared vision. And by choosing to use Plone-the-product, we soon realized that we were choosing to join Plone-the-community as well. And that’s the real subject of this essay.

Within 18 months, me and my colleagues at ONE/Northwest went from wet-behind-the-ears Plone newbies to key leaders in the Plone community. How did that happen? What lessons can we learn about Open Source and nonprofits from our experiences?

It all started with something that came naturally to us, as technology-savvy environmental activists. Once we’d gotten a few projects under our belts, we started blogging about our work with Plone. We talked about how excited we were about it, what was going well, and what we thought could be improved. Before long, our writings caught the eye of the Plone’s co-founders, Alan Runyan and Alex Limi. Alan was in the midst of planning the 2006 North America Plone Symposium, and one day in February 2006, my phone rang.

“Hi Jon, this is Alan Runyan, how’re you doin’?” drawled a friendly southern voice. (Alan’s from Texas by way of New Orleans.) I cupped my hand over the phone and stage whispered across the room to Andrew Burkahlter, one of our Plone programmers, “It’s _Alan Runyan_ on the phone!” Alan continued, “Hey, it sounds like y’all are doing some really great stuff for nonprofits with Plone. I’d love to have you come talk about it at the Plone Symposium in New Orleans next month.” Before I knew it, I had agreed, and Andrew Burkhalter, Jon Baldivieso and I headed down to the Delta to meet the Plone community in person and to do a workshop on our Plone development practices.

I was nervous. First day of junior high nervous. Not about our presentation — we knew what we were doing with Plone and we’d had plenty of time to prepare. This was a more elemental nervous: “will they *like* me?” “Will I like them?” What were these Open Source programmers going to be like? Would three self-taught environmental activist/website hackers like us fit in with these world-class programmers? Would we have anything to talk about? Would they like to drink beer?

My nervousness mounted a bit when I realized that our presentation was scheduled for the first afternoon of the conference, and directly opposite Geoff Davis’ high-profile talk about how to make Plone sites really fast. Would anyone come to our talk? Would anyone care? Well, we didn’t have as many people in our room as Geoff did in his. But sitting right in the back row from the first minute to the last were Alan and Alex. As soon as we finished, Alex was the first person to the front of the room, and he said, “Wow, that was probably the best talk I’ve ever seen at a Plone conference.”

Our stomachs unclenched.

Thinking about it a bit over a beer later that night, I realized that this was what effective Open Source community leadership looked like in action. Alan and Alex went out of their way to make us feel welcome, included and appreciated. We noticed, and it felt great. We came back home to Seattle walking on air.

In New Orleans, we’d also met Joel Burton, another core Plone community member, who used to work in the nonprofit sector in Washington, DC before becoming a full-time Plone consultant and trainer. We felt an instant rapport with Joel, and shortly thereafter partnered with Joel and the Plone users at the University of Washington to offer a “Plone Bootcamp” training in Seattle. As nonprofit folks, organizing and promoting an event came pretty naturally to us. It was a smashing success and sold out in two weeks. Joel was impressed.

In June 2006, it was time to start putting together the annual worldwide Plone Conference. The folks in Vienna, Austria who’d hosted it the previous two years were not in a position to host it again, and there was no successor standing in the wings. The Plone Foundation was keen to bring the conference back across the Atlantic. And they realized that the scrappy band of environmentalists from Seattle had shown a bit of a flair for organizing events and for making Plone understandable to non-technical users.

My phone rang again. Several times.

“Jon, we would really like to see ONE/Northwest put together a proposal for hosting the Plone Conference,” the voices of various Plone Foundation board members said. I swallowed hard.

After a couple of conversations with key Plone community members and past conference organizers, we realized that their expectations were both modest and reasonable and the whole thing suddenly seemed feasible. We agreed, and plunged headlong into organizing a global Open Source software community conference for October 2006.

We worked hard on it, the community rallied behind us, and the conference went off without a hitch. 350 Plonistas from around the world descended on Seattle for a full week of trainings, workshops and a coding sprint.

For many attendees (including us!) the highlight of the conference was a keynote address from Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center and a professor of law at Columbia University. Dr. Moglen is the key legal strategist for the free software movement, and has been a central player in a fifteen-year effort to promote free and open source software and to defend it against legal attacks from powerful and determined corporate adversaries. In his emotional keynote speech (which you can watch online), Dr. Moglen drew powerful connections from the daily work of producing and sharing Open Source software to the generations-long struggle for human freedom and dignity. He placed our work in a far broader context than most of us had previously conceived of, and explicitly linked the values of Open Source with larger values of freedom and social justice. We were thrilled.

We left Plone Conference 2006 tired, but ecstatic. Our post-conference evaluations confirmed what people had been telling us all week: we’d blown away folks’ expectations for what a Plone conference could be. They’d learned a lot. They’d had fun. They felt inspired and energized. We felt like heroes.

But that’s not where the story ends. In fact, that’s where it begins. Suddenly, I was famous. Or rather, an awful lot of people in the Plone community knew who I was, thought I was a good guy, thought that ONE/Northwest was an amazing organization, and felt that we had done a tremendous service to them and to Plone. In addition to that, we were now friends with many of the core Plone developers. In other words, we suddenly found ourselves in possession of “social capital.”

What did that mean? Well, people immediately wanted us to do more, since we had demonstrated some competence. But we also found that we had access and influence. A lot of people were suddenly willing to go far above and beyond the call of duty to answer our questions (and the baseline for duty is pretty high in the Plone community!). The Plone developers actively solicited our opinions about new features and projects. They listened very closely to our thoughts about where Plone needed to go, put a lot of stock in our opinions and were willing to spend time and energy to address our concerns.

Other direct outcomes of our work on Plone Conference 2006 have included:

Recruiting a key staff person, Veda Williams, from across the country to join our Plone team. “I wouldn’t have had any idea how great ONE/Northwest is if you hadn’t run the conference,” Veda told me after we’d hired her. We’re pretty confident that we’ll have no trouble recruiting more top-tier Plone talent as demand for our services continues to increase.

Working with Joel Burton to help organize additional Plone Bootcamps — in Portland, OR and a repeat engagement in Seattle, WA.

A number of minor feature enhancements and bug fixes in the newest release of Plone that will help make our lives as Plone integrators a bit easier.

Sponsorship from Joel Burton and Plone Bootcamps to send ONE/Northwest staff members to Naples, Italy for Plone Conference 2007, as well as the opportunity to offer a high-profile session presenting Plone 3 the world at Plone Conference 2007 in Naples, Italy.

We’re also hoping to leverage our leadership work in the Plone community into some grant funding to deepen our investment even further in the next couple of years. We know we’ll have the support of key Plone community leaders when the time comes.

The next chapters in the story remain to be written, but we’re very excited about the next few months.

Nonprofits and Open Source, More Broadly

Nonprofits and the geeks who love them can draw some larger lessons about nonprofits and Open Source communities from ONE/Northwest’s experience engaging with the Plone community.

Nonprofits and Open Source communities are both driven by values. Their values are compatible, but not identical.

What’s the same?

Nonprofits are driven by their missions, which are often based in a passionate, values-based vision of how the world can be better than it is. So are Open Source communities. Both tend to value openness, transparency and sharing. That’s really cool. It can lead to great collaborations where nonprofits are willing to invest cash and sweat equity into open-source communities, and give specific, public feedback about the business needs that open-source software needs to meet. For example, Oxfam International has made big investments in the Plone community that have benefitted not only Oxfam, but every user of Plone.

Complimentary strengths

The nonprofit sector has a lot of people in it who are good at building and sustaining thriving organizations that are able to work together across time and space to achieve long-term goals with limited financial and human resources. We tend to be good at planning events, raising money and putting together specific projects that accomplish something tangible while leading toward a larger goal. I’ve found that open-source communities really value these kinds of skills that are commonly found in community organizer and activists.

Conversely, open-source communities have a lot of programmers who are good at finding a way to “just get things done.” The programmers I’ve worked with tend to dislike process and let their results (code) speak for itself. The best open-source communities have a culture of “do-ocracy” (thanks to Kaliya Hamlin for the neologism!), where it’s relatively hard to manifest “stop energy.” Nonprofits can learn a lot from watching these behaviors in practice; we like to think we’re “action-oriented” but we shouldn’t pat ourselves on the back too much. Open-source communities are really agile.

What’s different

Most nonprofits have a specific educational, service or social change mission. The mission of an open source community is usually to build great software where the source code is free for use, inspection and modification. Those missions are not incompatible with each other, but neither are they identical.

Nonprofits often have very explicit (non-partisan) political and policy agendas. Open-source communities tend not to, although their individual members often do! While some nonprofits earn a significant fraction of their income, most nonprofits are not focused on generating economic profits. While many open-source developers are volunteers, many make their living doing technology consulting around the open-source tools they contribute to. Some open-source folks are enthusiastic (even cutthroat!) capitalists. (And to be fair, so are some nonprofit folks!) Bottom line: nonprofits shouldn’t assume that open-source communities share their motivations and ideologies, and vice versa.

Open-source communities are often global in scale, and encompass folks from many different sectors. In running Plone Conference 2006, I worked with people from twenty countries, 35 states, and every sector of the economy including Fortune 500 companies, universities, state and local governments, independent consultants, nonprofit activists and more. It was a far more diverse community socially, economically and geographically than the communities that define many (but surely not all) nonprofits.

On Leadership

In both nonprofit and open source communities, quality leadership matters. A lot. I think that good leadership is probably one of the most important factors in the long-term success of both nonprofit organizations and open-source communities. I’ve been priveleged to work with some extremely talented leaders in both areas.

I think it’s easy for nonprofits to imagine that open-source communities are anarchic or leaderless, simply becaues they don’t have formal hierarchies and organization charts. They’re not. Just because there’s no “Executive Director” or “CEO” of an open-source project doesn’t mean there aren’t strong, dynamic leaders, clear responsibilities and strong decision-making processes. And often, like in nonprofits, the true leadership comes from the edges, and bears little relationship to title or formal position. The leaders are the people who communicate well, listen more, offer positive feedback, and show passion, integrity and authenticity. Social capital flows towards people who display these kinds of behaviors.

I’ve watched leaders in the Plone community go out of their way to make newcomers feel welcome and included; groom new leaders into positions of responsibility; give each other difficult-but-constructive feedback; work towards consensus around big, difficult decisions; build long term strategic relationships with partners; and create long-term institutions to carry on important work even as individuals come and go.

I’ve also watched members of the Plone community make some of the same mistakes that many nonprofits do: squelch creativity with “stop energy”; fall victim to “not invented here” syndrome; forget to treat newbies with respect; forget to celebrate success; fail to consider the longer-term impacts of decisions that seem expedient in the short term; fail to spend enough time listening to key stakeholders; fail to plan for the long-term. We’re human, we make all of the mistakes that people anywhere do.

What Nonprofits Should Learn from Open Source

Transparent organizational structures that are open to participation can really work.

Appropriate use of technology tools can bridge time and distance very effectively, but face to face still counts for a lot, so don’t forget to budget time and money for it.

Spend more time doing and trying, and worry less about perfect decision-making processes. You’re going to make a lot of wrong choices on the way to success, anyway. Failure is not just an option, it’s a requirement!

Collaborating with your peers, even though you may sometimes compete with them too, is more powerful than going it alone.

What Open Source Communities Can Learn From Nonprofits

The best nonprofits are very good at telling compelling stories to market themselves and inspire passion and commitment. That’s an important skill, but it doesn’t happen magically. It needs to be cultivated and invested in.

Invest in leadership skills any way you can. It pays huge rewards.

Nonprofits are often good at convening people to discuss strategy and make decisions together. There’s a lot of facilitation skills involved in that. Few people are intuitively good at this. The skills are teachable, but you have to commit to learning them.

The code isn’t documentation.

Organizing skills, consistently applied over time, are vital to the health of open source communities.

15 thoughts on “Nonprofits, Open Source and Leadership: ONE/Northwest and the Plone Community”

Jon, spot on. I’ll be translating it for use at the dutch branch of Friends of the Earth, where I work as the proverbial mixture of geek and activist 🙂
No really, it has pointers to improving the sometimes very syrupy process at nonprofits with some of the meritocracy or “do-ocracy” (great word!) of open source, and contribute back to the open source community some of the skills we as non-profits have acquired in the fields of communication, facilitating and inclusiveness.
It sort of screams out for a relaxed evening session in Naples….

As usual, I am impressed by the way you express your ideas.
More than that, I like both to agree with you and to learn stuff from a different point of view.
About documentation, I think Plone team need leaders. I hope we are finally in a situation where we have found some. Good leaders need to be passionate about what they lead (in this case, documentation). This shows we need different profiles in Plone.inc 😉 and especially non coders.

Thanks, Jon, for a very thoughtful and useful essay. I’ve mailed the link to the board of our local community network (which is my main volunteer activity). They really appreciated it, and I expect we’ll be discussing it for days to come.

Kudos to you guys at ONE/Northwest. The political and management aspects of FOSS projects you raise remind me of some sections of Karl Fogel’s book (Producing Open Source Software at http://producingoss.com/).

As an humble human being trying to push FOSS philosophy in my current organization (and having to fight inertia, people not wanting to bother a change in entrenched computational habits, etc.), I find stories like yours a source of motivation and an efficient radiator to ventilate my own transient frustrations. Long-term stubborness coupled with agile short-term openness or is it the other way around ;-). I hope to be able to tell my story one day.

Jon, Thanks for this – it’s a great writeup. I wish I could include the whole thing in the primer – but I’m glad there is a bit of a taste of it there. It’s great that there are more and more stories like this out there.

Jon,
You are not only doing great advocacy work on behalf of the nonprofit community for a better Plone, you are also serving as its unofficial Plone help desk guru. This deserves to be acknowledged. Thanks for your many tips and postings that appear online and in your offline personal replies to questions great and small.

After a few days of decantation, I feel the jist of your essay has to do with the greatness and diversity of the Plone community. That Paul Everitt, one of the most articulate proponent of Plone-the-community, was the very first to comment your essay speaks for itself. Which brings me to the idea that plone.org should convey more prominently the idea that Plone is a great community. I would suggest adding a fourth item to the “What is Plone” section of plone.org : “Who is Plone” or “People of Plone” or “Plone community” that would point to a list of organizations/individuals and what they are involved in.

Not many people know about the exact involvement of Oxfam for example. How many man/month-years? What Plone products specifically? How did Oxfam’s money and in kind involvement make Plone a better product for all? I see some short report, a la news, or one-liners with the name of the organization, some idea of the overall amount of work (a hyperlink to a more formal involvement summary maybe ?) and names of projects linked to their respective locations in the plone.org/products section. What do you think ?

Jon, great article. Really nice write up of the ONE/Northwest experience in the Plone community. If I can write up our experience in the Salesforce.com community with even half the insight of this article, I’ll be pleased. Nice work.